Saxophone with Byron S.

I started playing the clarinet when I was 9 years old. It was a silver clarinet. For my 12th birthday I received a Conn tenor sax. Went to a club with my dad and heard for the first time Boots Musulli, a Charlie Parker disciple and found a way to take lessons from him. I was 15 and couldn't drive so I had to take a bus an hour to each lesson in Milford, MA. Throughout high school and college I played in every big band available, usually lead alto. At New York University I had the good fortune to play with the great saxophonist Dave Liebman. In 1986 I studied jazz improv with Jerry Bergonzi in Boston. In 1981 I created and directed the Vermont Law School Community Jazz Ensemble and in 1985 created Jazz Vermont, a band camp for adults, now renamed just, Jazz Camp. That program continues on into its 35th year. The Jazz Camp program has allowed me to get people back into music as many of them stopped playing earlier in their life. Love jazz, love bebop, Count Basie, Rob McConnell, Sammy Nestico arrangements. and especially the jazz duets that Boots wrote out for us to play. I still have them.